Rock Health, Say Media, Food Frenzy: The 1-Minute Version of Last Week’s Bay Area BizTech News

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Memorial Day observances made last week shorter than usual, but there was enough news from the local information technology sector for any week twice its length.

—San Francisco-based Rock Health, a new incubator for companies focused on using digital technologies to fix inefficiencies in the healthcare system, unveiled its first class of startups. They range from to CellScope, which makes smartphone attachments that can be used to diagnose ear infections, to Omada Health, a social network for diabetics.

—My Friday column took a look at the burgeoning world of food startups, where entrepreneurs are using the Web and mobile devices to simplify everything from to finding a farmer’s market to understanding nutrition labels. The column includes a list of nearly 60 startups, including 10 whose names start with “Food” (Foodbuzz, Foodia, Foodily, Foodista, Foodler, Foodori, Foodspotting, Foodtree, Fooducopia, and Foodzie).

—One of the companies on my list was Grubwithus, a Y Combinator-backed company that helps users sign up for discounted restaurant meals with strangers as a way of getting to know new people. Grubwithus expanded to Boston last week on its way to building a network of 30 U.S. cities, as my colleague Erin reported.

—Convore, a Y Combinator-backed startup co-founded by former Pownce founder Leah Culver, is out to reboot the idea of real-time group chat, an idea that’s been with us since the late 1980s in the form of Internet Relay Chat, or IRC. Convore’s system is Web-based and has key features that were always missing from IRC, such as persistent user identities and archives of old conversations.